Literary Theory

What do literary texts do to us and for us? We will think about the workings of language and narrative, the molding and modeling of subjectivity and the relationship of literature to the world it struggles to recreate. Theorists may include Aristotle, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, F. Jameson, T. de Lauretis, J. Butler, E. Said, E. Sedgwick. Class time will be divided between lecture and discussion; students will write frequent short idea papers that will be presented and discussed in class.